Microeconomic Analysis is the study of how societies control and organize the production and distribution of goods and services. In this course, we will attempt to explain how consumers, firms, and workers interact, why they behave in particular ways, and what the outcome of that behavior might be. We will not teach you how to run a business or play the stock market: those subjects fall into the domain of business and management courses.

Economists try to understand how and why the economy works. There is much that we already know, but there is also a great deal that we still don’t understand. With only a few exceptions, economists failed to foresee the possibility of the financial and economic crisis that struck in 2008 (I certainly didn’t), and the profession lost a lot of its credibility as a result. But at this time there is a lot of research focused on understanding what caused the crisis, big data, markets with poor information and healthcare markets . These vital issues make economics an exciting subject, both to teach and to study. We hope we can share that excitement with you. But please don’t expect us to give you clear-cut answers to the important economic questions of our time; we do not have them to give.

For me, teaching EC101 is a great challenge. The physicist Richard Feynman told professors, “If you can’t explain something to a first-year student, then you haven’t really understood it.” He was right.